TEP Charter: Teacher Pay, Student Scores

Wikipedia describes The Equity Project as

The Equity Project (TEP) is a New York charter school opened in September 2009. The school will instruct students in fifth through eighth grades and will pay its teachers a starting salary of $125,000 per year, more than double the national average. Teachers must also work double the hours a typical teacher works.

Now Vox reports that This school paid teachers $125,000 a year — and test scores went up

Four years later, students at TEP score better on state tests than similar students elsewhere. The differences were particularly pronounced in math, according to a study from Mathematica Policy Research released in October. (The study was funded by the Gates Foundation.) After four years at the school, students had learned as much math as they would have in 5.6 years elsewhere: ...

... Teachers at TEP also get more time to collaborate and played a bigger role in school decision-making than teachers in other jobs. Teachers were paired up to observe each others' lessons and provide feedback, collaboration that experts agree is important but happens too infrequently. During a six-week summer training, teachers also helped set school policy.

The workload at TEP, where teachers also take on administrative duties and had an average of 31 students per class, is fairly heavy even with the extra pay. But the school also had more teacher turnover than usual. Nearly half of first-year teachers didn't return for their second year, either because they resigned or because they were not rehired.

Intriguing...and a hopeful sign generally. It should be noted, however, that I got to that report from the link at statistics-prof Andrew Gelman's blog on Time-release pedagogy?? - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

...there’s something strange here or i’m missing something obvious. That jump from 3-year impact to 4-year seems excessive.

That does seem really odd. Still, it's a hopeful sign.

Education Election

A Time Magazine "ViewPoint" says that The Election Has Compromised Education Reform

The 2012 presidential election sidestepped the issue of school reform. Neither candidate spent much time laying out, let alone talking up, an education policy agenda. But around the country, there were ballot referendums and state and local races with big implications for schools. Teachers’ unions had a good night, but so did charter schools....

We don't know the right answer... we muddle on.
Until we can't, of course.

Educational Cartoons...

Problems must be solved and dilemmas require compromise, according to Larry Cuban -- Cartoons on Problems and Dilemmas | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

I worked with K-12 teachers, principals, school board members and superintendents in distinguishing between problems and dilemmas when it came to figuring out school reforms and getting into complexities of classroom practice. Occasionally, I would use cartoons to make my points...

Interesting and fun, but the most thought-provoking item I found was not one of the cartoons, was not even one of the linked cartoons, but was a linked absence-of-cartoons in Cartoons/YouTube on Charter Schools | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Of all the cartoons on charters that I found, every single one opposed them. I scoured the Internet and could not find a pro-charter cartoon. I do understand that the nature of cartoons is to satirize and caricature but those I found hammered again and again the theme that charters are, at best, harmful to, and, at worst, destroying public schools.

I have a feeling that controversy-cartoons generally do "anti" much better than "pro", and this is supported by the commenter who tells him to look for anti-union cartoons (as being implicitly or explicitly pro-charter, I guess). Very odd.
Or then again, maybe not.

Teacher Evaluation

Economics Nobelist Gary Becker seems to approve this summer's new teacher-evaluation research; in Good and Bad Teachers: How to Tell the Difference he says

Teacher unions all over the country have fought against using performance-based measures to evaluate teachers, but the unions are gradually losing this battle...
...the criterion used in evaluating teachers by many school systems and also by academic articles on school reform is the value added (VA) by teachers to student performance; namely, the improvements in students’ test scores as a result of taking classes of different teachers.
... the fundamental way to judge teachers is not how their students do on tests, but how different teachers affect the likelihood that their students finish high school and go to college, how teachers affect the earnings of their students after they enter the labor force, and whether their students get involved in gangs and crimes.
A small number of recent academic studies have tried to see how well VA measures predict how students do when they become adults. A summary of a good study along these lines by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff was published this summer in the journal Education Next under the title “Great Teaching”. ... 20 years... 2.5 million children ...
They find large effects on subsequent adult earnings when these young students had teachers who produced good improvements in test scores...

teachers with good VA ratings should be paid considerably more than teachers with bad ratings.

Or then again, maybe not.

Chicago

Wins, losses and draws in Chicago school strike - CNN.com

"Across the board, on every issue, the teachers got a more favorable outcome than the school system," [Professor Bruno] said Wednesday.
The deal, which still must be ratified by the union's overall membership, calls for an average raise of 17.6% over four years... it also strips out a merit pay program that would have been tied to increased emphasis on student test scores... Teachers also managed to hold the line on health insurance increases, and protect seniority pay increases and raises for additional education that the school system wanted to limit or eliminate. Union officials also trumpeted victories in ... The union didn't get all it wanted. In addition to the salary compromise, the school day and year will be extended
"The mayor doesn't walk away empty-handed from this,"

Well, maybe not quite.

From the viewpoint of progressive Matthew Yglesias we get Chicago public schools' pension crunch.

I get annoyed when conservatives talking about the federal government running out of money, but listening to some progressive crowing about the outcome of the Chicago teachers strike it's also frustrating when people don't acknowledge that the city of Chicago most certainly can run out of money. Things like extra money for music and art teachers could be great ideas or could be bad ones depending on where it comes from. But it's not as if Chicago Public Schools is sitting on some giant pile of money that administrations have just been refusing to use. On the contrary, it's actually sitting on a large unfunded pension obligation:...

Everybody's going broke.
Or then again, maybe not?

update: The libertarian summary is found on Saturday Links | The Agitator

Step one: Capitulate to the teachers’ union in the largest city in your state. Step two: Ask the rest of America to guarantee your state’s $200 billion pension gap.

Yeah, everybody's going broke.

Chicago teachers vs. teaching?

The Economist notes on The teachers' strike in Chicago: Fighting irrelevance with fire that

The boffins at the Urban Education Institute (UEI) in Chicago have written an exemplary book on school improvement. They looked at 100 elementary schools that showed progress in attendance and test scores over a seven-year period, and 100 others that did not. They argue—with quantitative data—that five essential pillars are needed to build a great school. These are:

• effective school leadership,
• collaborative teachers (with committed staff and professional development),
• parent-community ties,
• a student-centered (and safe) learning climate with high expectations,
• and ambitious and demanding instruction.

(Reformatted.) I'm always suspicious of lists like that, but it's plausible. In any case, like most of what I've read in the past few days, the point of the article is far from favorable towards the striking teachers; the author here believes that they not just demanding more money, but trying to prevent improvements in a failing school system. And this seems to be bipartisan, to a considerable extent: they're battling Rahm Emanuel, extremely prominent Democrat, while from the other side we hear Paul Ryan on Chicago Teachers’ Strike: ‘We Stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’ - ABC News

“I’ve known Rahm Emanuel for years. He’s a former colleague of mine. Rahm and I have not agreed on every issue or on a lot of issues, but Mayor Emanuel is right today in saying that this teacher’s union strike is unnecessary and wrong. We know that Rahm is not going to support our campaign, but on this issue and this day we stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel.”

Emanuel and Ryan both like charters, too. So do I. And they both like external evaluation. I have mixed feelings about that. Should Teachers Be Graded On Standardized Tests?

if you think that teachers do make a difference, and that some of the teachers aren’t very good, it seems to me that you have two choices. Hold out for a decentralized, discretionary, local-knowledge based system which has no change of materializing for various legal and structural reasons. Or develop admittedly imperfect evaluations, and use them as a replacement metric for seniority and ed credentials. Naturally, the teachers will hate this, in part because some of the resulting decisions will in fact be unfair. But it might be the best we can do.

Well, in Chicago it might be the best they can do; I suspect that local small schools can eventually do better. Or then again, maybe not.

There was also a roundup of opposing views at Chicago Teacher Strike: A News and Opinion Roundup | Via Meadia.

Education Numbers?

Back to School: Teachers Union Loses Members While Per-Pupil Spending Soars

As children head back to the classrooms, let’s look at two important figures to consider this school year: 308,000 and $11,400.
308,000: Number of members lost by the National Education Association.
$11,400: Average per-pupil, per year spending in public schools.
... Sadly, continual increases in the money spent per child and in overall spending haven’t led to increases in academic achievement.

And of course for New Yorkers, it's worth remembering a third number: New York schools lead nation in spending per pupil, Census Bureau reports | syracuse.com

New York’s public schools spend far more per student than any other state, according to a report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The bureau examined spending across the nation for fiscal year 2010. It found New York schools spent $18,618 per pupil, far above the national average of $10,615.

One way or another, things will change.

"Won't Back Down"

Teachers on the Defensive - NYTimes.com

“Our very best teachers ought to be treated much, much better than they are today,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. “But in order to get there, we need to be able to say out loud that some teachers are better than others.”
That’s precisely what “Won’t Back Down” says. Although the movie is bound, in this politically charged climate, to be analyzed solely in terms of the position it seems to take on parent trigger or its qualms with union behavior, it’s ultimately about the impact of superior teaching, the need to foster more of it and the importance of school accountability. Who could quibble with any of that?